History of opera

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of opera begins with a single lost score. Jacopo Peri's Dafne, composed in 1597 in Florence, survives today only as a libretto and a few musical fragments. Yet that vanished work launched one of the most elaborate and durable art forms humanity has ever devised. How did a small circle of Florentine scholars produce something that would fill the grandest theaters in Europe for the next four centuries? What forces kept reshaping opera every few decades, pulling it between music and text, between comedy and tragedy, between the elite and the crowd? And why did a form invented in Italy become the property of the entire Western world, generating its own distinct schools in France, Germany, England, and Spain? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Florentine Experiment

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  Count Giovanni de' Bardi sponsored the group that invented opera. His salon in late 16th-century Florence gathered scholars and musicians under the name Florentine Camerata, and they set themselves a peculiar task: to recover the emotional power of Ancient Greek theater. Among them was Vincenzo Galilei, father of the scientist Galileo, a Hellenist who had written a method of tablature for the lute and who published his theoretical arguments in Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna in 1581. His core argument was that polyphony, where many voices sing simultaneously, produced an incoherent musical discourse. What Ancient Greece had used, the Camerata believed, was a single melodic line: the monody.

  Girolamo Mei, the member who most deeply investigated Greek theatrical practice, had already identified the key principle in his De modis musicis antiquorum of 1573. Individual singing, he noted, produced a specific emotional affect in its audience that choral polyphony could not. The Camerata took that observation and made it practical. The genre they coined was called opera in musica.

  The composer Jacopo Peri turned theory into performance. In 1597 he created Dafne, with a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini drawn from the myth of Apollo and Daphne; Peri himself played Apollo. Only three years later came Euridice, again with Rinuccini's text, composed to celebrate the wedding of Henry IV of France and Maria de Medici in Florence. It is the first surviving complete opera. A fellow Camerata member, Giulio Caccini, set the same Rinuccini libretto to music in 1602 and also wrote Le nuove musiche that year, the first theoretical treatise on the new genre.

  Caccini's daughter Francesca, a singer and composer, became the first woman to compose an opera: La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina, in 1625. The secularism of these early works was itself remarkable. At a time when almost all musical production was religious, the Camerata was setting profane dramatic texts to music and staging them for the Medici nobility, who became the new form's first patrons.

• 3. Monteverdi and the Shape of the Form

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  Claudio Monteverdi received his commission in 1607 from the House of Gonzaga in Mantua, and what he delivered redefined the new genre. La favola d'Orfeo, with libretto by Alessandro Striggio, called for an orchestra of forty-three instruments, including two organs. It had a prologue and five acts. For the first time in an opera, libretti were printed so the audience could follow along.

  Monteverdi named his opening section a "symphony" and divided the sung portions into "arias," imposing a structural vocabulary that opera would carry for centuries. He also introduced the ritornello, an instrumental stanza repeated between the five acts. Among the voices, he distinguished roles precisely: Orpheus was tenor, Eurydice soprano, Charon bass. Monteverdi's own formula for the relationship between text and music was unambiguous: "the word must be decisive, it must direct the harmony, not serve it."

  In 1608 he premiered L'Arianna, again with Rinuccini's text, in Mantua. Almost the entire score was lost. Only one fragment survived: the Lamento d'Arianna. Monteverdi himself moved to Venice in 1613, where he became maestro di cappella of the St. Mark's Basilica and composed twelve operas. His L'incoronazione di Poppea of 1642, with libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello drawn from Tacitus and Suetonius, is considered his finest work. It was one of the first operas built on historical rather than mythological subject matter.

  That same early period produced the first recognized opera singer of great talent: the tenor Francesco Rasi, already celebrated before the genre existed. He had entered the service of the Gonzaga family in 1598 and performed Orpheus in Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607. He was also a composer, though his work Cibele ed Ati of 1617 is lost. Meanwhile in Rome, the Barberini family, backed by Pope Paul V, built an auditorium for three thousand people in their palace and began training a new generation of operatists.

• 4. The Business of Venice

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  In 1637 a palace belonging to the Tron family in Venice was converted into the Teatro San Cassiano, the first public opera house in the world. The shift was decisive. Opera had been born under aristocratic patronage, performed for courts and wedding celebrations. Now it was a commercial enterprise, dependent on ticket-buying audiences whose preferences directly shaped what composers wrote.

  The Teatro San Cassiano was founded by Domenico Mazzocchi, who had also initiated the professional hiring of singers for opera. After the San Cassiano opened, new theaters followed quickly: Santi Giovanni e Paolo in 1639, San Moisè in 1640, Novissimo in 1641, Santi Apostoli in 1649, and San Samuele in 1655. It was in these Venetian venues that the now-standard opera house layout developed: the piazza-like floor surrounded by tiers of boxes.

  Public audiences shifted the art in specific ways. They gravitated toward high-pitched voices, so the use of large orchestras and choirs declined; an accompaniment of roughly ten to fifteen instruments became the norm. Comic elements multiplied and texts simplified, because in the arias especially, how a singer interpreted a phrase mattered more than the words themselves. Venice also generated the concept of bel canto, a demanding vocal technique requiring a uniform tone sustained across phrases in a continuous legato. The castrati and the prima donna sopranos were its foremost practitioners.

  The Venetian stage also absorbed something unexpected: the Spanish theater of the Golden Age. Plots drawn from Lope de Vega and from the tradition Cervantes had helped open with Don Quixote found their way into Venetian opera. The mixing of comic and tragic characters, the taste for disguise and cross-dressing, the relationships between lords and servants, what the milieu called all'usanza spagnuola, shaped the narrative texture of Venetian opera in ways that later spread across Europe.

  The castrato Siface was one of the Venetian era's most celebrated performers. His admirers included Christina of Sweden and Henry Purcell. Anna Renzi became the first soprano to achieve the status of prima donna, playing Octavia, wife of Nero, in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea.

• 5. France and the Contest for Opera's Soul

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  French opera arrived through a political act. In 1669 the poet Pierre Perrin and the composer Robert Cambert won from King Louis XIV the royal privilege to found the Académie Royale de Musique, housed in the Jeu de Paume de la Bouteille theater. Their opera Pomone, premiered in 1671, was the first opera written in French. Within a year, Perrin was imprisoned for debt. The royal privilege passed to Jean-Baptiste Lully, a Florentine by birth whose real name was Giovanni Battista Lulli.

  Lully's transformation of the form was systematic. He gave choirs a larger role, expanded the orchestra, shortened the arias, and developed a distinctly French overture in a slow-fast-slow structure that was the opposite of the Italian fast-slow-fast pattern. He created what he called déclamation mélodique, adapting vocal lines to the prosody of the French language. From 1673 until his death in 1687, he composed one opera per year, most with libretti by Philippe Quinault: Cadmus et Hermione, Alceste, Atys, Proserpine, Persée, Phaëton, Amadis, Armide, and Acis et Galatée. Alceste, celebrating Louis XIV's victory in the Franche-Comté and drawn from Euripides, was his greatest public success.

  After Lully, the dominant figure was Jean-Philippe Rameau. He did not compose his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, until he was fifty, in 1733. His work generated a cultural war: the quarrel of Lullyists and Ramists split audiences between those who wanted to preserve Lully's tradition and those who welcomed Rameau's greater emphasis on music over text. In the 1750s came a second quarrel, this time between French and Italian schools, with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau supporting Italian opera buffa. Rousseau himself wrote an opera, Le devin du village, in 1752, of modest quality, but its depiction of simple country characters as virtuous and the nobility as corrupt proved influential in the years leading to the French Revolution.

• 6. The War Between Music and Text

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  The debate over whether music or text should govern opera was present from the beginning and never fully resolved. Monteverdi had insisted the word must direct harmony. Decades later, Christoph Willibald Gluck carried out what the source calls a reform of opera seria, pushing back against the ornate vocal excesses that had accumulated under the Neapolitan school. After Gluck, Mozart articulated the opposite view with comparable authority: "poetry must be the obedient servant of music."

  The Neapolitan school had itself crystallized the formal grammar of opera seria. Alessandro Scarlatti, who served as chapel master to Christina of Sweden and to the viceroy of Naples, as well as director of the Teatro San Bartolomeo, invented the three-part aria da capo in an ABA structure, reduced improvisational ornamentation by the singers, and introduced the brief cavatina for secondary characters. One observer, Luigi Fait, wrote that "with Scarlatti, Italian opera reaches the height of its beauty." There are 114 known operas by Scarlatti.

  The power of librettists in this period was extraordinary. Apostolo Zeno, a Venetian historian, became imperial poet to Charles VI in 1718, replacing Silvio Stampiglia. He wrote thirty-five librettos and introduced a code of honor into his plots. His successor Pietro Metastasio, who replaced Zeno in the imperial post, wrote twenty-seven librettos over a fifty-year career that were set to music in some one hundred operas. The term "metastasian opera" describes the elegant, soloist-centered dramatic world he created. Together, Zeno and Metastasio developed what they called the doctrine of the affections: a systematic mapping of emotions to musical forms, so that love, hate, sadness, hope, and despair each had an assigned aria type or instrumental movement.

  Richard Wagner would later push the argument in an entirely different direction, proposing to dissolve the competition between text and music altogether by fusing all the arts into a single creation he called Gesamtkunstwerk, a "total work of art."

• 7. Castrati, Divas, and the Cult of the Voice

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  Baroque audiences wanted voices that did not exist in nature. To produce them, children who excelled at singing were castrated before puberty, so that their voices would not change. As adults, castrati retained the pitch range of a child but with the lung capacity and musculature of a man, producing voices described as more powerful, flexible, and penetrating than those of women singing the same register. Vibrato singing, with its fluctuations in timbre, pitch, and intensity, was introduced during this same period as a further tool of emotional expressiveness.

  By the era between 1700 and 1750, the stage was dominated by castrati and prime donne in what the source calls the golden age of classical bel canto. The most celebrated castrato was Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli. He performed across Europe to extraordinary reception. He retired at the age of thirty-two, at the height of his fame, and entered the service of Philip V of Spain. Among his teachers was Nicola Porpora, who also taught the castrato Caffarelli and the composer Johann Adolph Hasse.

  On the soprano side, fierce competition reached a notorious pitch. The sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni both performed in London for Handel, and their rivalry grew so intense that they came to blows during a performance of Bononcini's Astianatte in 1727. The institution of the prima donna, the leading female singer who commanded the stage, and the diva who commanded the culture around it, grew out of exactly this Venetian and Baroque celebrity culture.

  The comic intermezzi that had developed to satisfy the audience members who missed the comic characters that opera seria had eliminated gave rise, by the 18th century, to the opera buffa. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi died at twenty-six, but his intermezzo La serva padrona, performed in the intermissions of Il prigionier superbo in 1733, eventually became the canonical example of the new genre achieving independence from the serious opera it had been designed to punctuate.

• 8. Opera Reaches the World

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  Opera spread beyond Italy through a combination of royal patronage, diplomatic accident, and the sheer mobility of Italian musicians. The German-speaking world was among the first to receive it: Heinrich Schütz adapted Rinuccini's Dafne in 1627 with clear Monteverdian influence, and Sigmund Theophil Staden composed Seelewig, the first opera in German, in 1644. Reinhard Keiser, working in Hamburg, became the first composer to write operas entirely in German; his output is estimated at between seventy-five and one hundred operas, though only nineteen complete scores survive. Georg Friedrich Handel composed forty-two operas, all in Italian despite his German origins, based mostly at the King's Theatre in London.

  In England, the first native opera, The Siege of Rhodes, was produced in 1656 during Cromwell's Puritan Revolution, with music divided among five composers. Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas followed in 1689, a commission for a college of young ladies, lasting an hour, with its final aria, the "Dido's lament" known by its opening words When I am laid in earth, achieving lasting fame. English audiences never fully adopted Italian opera, which explains the success of The Beggar's Opera in 1728, a deliberate anti-opera by Johann Christoph Pepusch and John Gay that launched the ballad opera genre.

  Spain produced something entirely its own. Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco composed La púrpura de la rosa in 1659, with text by Calderón de la Barca, and premiered it at the Viceroyal Palace of Lima. It is the first opera both composed and performed in the Americas. King Felipe IV's patronage of performances at the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid gave birth to the zarzuela as a distinct genre, and Juan Hidalgo became its founding composer with El laurel de Apolo in 1658.

  In Poland, King Ladislaus IV had witnessed opera in Tuscany and founded a company of Italian singers in Warsaw in 1632; the company premiered the first opera by a Polish author, La fama reale by Piotr Elert, in 1633. Antonio Vivaldi, working as chapel master at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, claimed in 1739 to have written ninety-four operas, though only about fifty librettos and twenty scores survive. The Teatro San Carlo of Naples, one of the most prestigious opera houses in the world, opened in 1737. From its founding, the genre had traveled from a Florentine palace to stages across two hemispheres.